


Monster Heart

by ShinobiCyrus



Series: Ectober Phanfiction [2]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, Crash Landing, Ectober (Danny Phantom), Fighter Pilots, One Shot, Shipwrecks, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28770843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShinobiCyrus/pseuds/ShinobiCyrus
Summary: When Valerie wakes up in what's left in her cockpit, her comms are dead, the skies are clear, and despite having crashed in what had been a bustling colony of thousands, she looks to be the only living thing in the city.Unless of course, the alien ship she hit before she crashed didn't also make it down here with her.
Relationships: Valerie Gray & Danielle "Dani" Phantom
Series: Ectober Phanfiction [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2109018
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Monster Heart

**Author's Note:**

> The Day 6 prompt for Ectober was 'Shipwreck.' I decided to shake it up with a bit of a sci-fi/horror theme. Technically there is a ship and it is most definitely wrecked. 
> 
> Warnings for squicky alien biotechnology. 

Computers aren’t known for their sympathy. Just efficiency. 

The shipboard AI pitilessly shocks Valerie back into consciousness like it’s turning on just another machine. Her whole body locks rigid like a muscle spasm, heart pounding and drowning in stims as her mouth gasps agape with a throat that can’t scream and intake oxygen at the same time. 

Eventually, the agony subsides and she slumps in the cockpit’s heavy-gee couch, body and brain swimming in exhaustion and a chemical cocktail sharpening her nerves into a raw razor. Training helps her keep her last meal down instead of getting into her helmet. The suit would eventually clean it, but never thoroughly enough to get rid of the smell.

MAD-E pipes up in that calm, motherly voice its programmers thought was soothing. _“Welcome Back, Lieutenant Gray!”_

Valerie is unsoothed.

She’s painfully aware of every sore, aching inch of herself. Each inhale presses down hard on her chest, but she manages to rasp: “Status.”

_“Emergency landing maneuver successful! We have touched down on Nova Ventura with only thirty-four percent damage to-”_

“What happened?”

_“On the twenty second of July, at approximately zero-three hundred hours standard, coded orders from the-”_

“To _me_ , you glitchy pile of-”

 _“Of course, Lieutenant,”_ MAD-E says agreeably. _“I’m afraid you sustained life-threatening injuries on impact, despite the forced landing countermeasures. You were put into emergency stasis until the pod’s medical program and your internal nanites could repair the damage.”_

That would explain the splitting headache, yeah. “How long was I out?”

_“Stasis was initiated thirty-six hours, twenty seven minutes ago.”_

“Good thing I get paid by the hour.” Valerie raises a palm and brings up the holo-displays with a thought. The walls of her pod buzz to life- most just showing black and three-dimensional scrolling text the computer diagnostic is spitting out. Her fingers tap at the controls and she’s given another error notice. “I can’t raise anyone on comms.” 

_“Communication with the_ Hartmann _and other support elements was cut off thirty-three hours, thirteen minutes ago.”_

A cold claw of dread squeezes something in her chest. “Cut off?”

 _“A signal of unknown origin is interfering with communications and long-range sensors. If there_ are _still friendly elements in this system, we have no way of contacting them- or even ascertaining if they are even there.”_

Valerie slumps in her gee-harness, suddenly feeling worlds heavier. “So we’re on our own.”

 _“For the moment, Lieutenant.”_ It goes for soothing again.

Like hell. 

Valerie sweeps aside the mess of diagnostics and accesses the hatch controls. _“Lieutenant,”_ MAD-E says, chiding. _“I do not recommend egress at this time. Forced-Landing Protocol states-”_

“First Lieutenant Valerie M. Gray, Lexic: Red Nine-Two-Four Slash-Wolf-Vee. Override Code: Shut Up and Do The Thing.”

_“Override Accepted.”_

Either the _Hartmann_ and her entire wing were debris up in orbit, or the battle is still dragging on. Both options mean there are still hostiles in-system. Maybe even on the planet with her. Staying put in a tin can like a good little regulation soldier strikes her as a profoundly bad plan.

The pod floods with hissing mist as the pressure equalizes and hatch finally blows open. Valerie’s helmet visor immediately darkens so she isn’t blinded by the rush of natural light. 

Crashing at Mach-3 and laying in a death-coma for thirty hours would give anyone sore legs. Valerie still manages to climb out of what’s left of her fighter. She’s outside, her pod resting in a crater-bed of cracked insta-crete on the rooftop of some building. There’s an entire city skyline behind her, fresh nanofactured towers barely a few years old glittering like diamonds in the shine of an alien sun. One of them has a hole in it, clean as a gunshot, lining up where Valerie’s pod had finally come to a rest.

“Damn,” Valerie whistles. “Any landing you can walk away from.”

* * *

From the quick briefing they’d all gotten before dropping in-system, estimates had _Nova Ventura_ at around fifty thousand colonists. Not bad for a fresh terraform on the rim. 

Walking down the street, sidearm ready in her hand, Valerie didn’t find a single person left.

Everywhere the juxtaposition of life: lights, scrolling holo-advertisments, parked cars, half-finished meals spoiling on outdoor cafe tables; but no people. No indications of a struggle. A dropped bag here, a crashed groundcar there. Hell, the worst damage in the city was caused by Valerie when she crashed.

There hadn’t even been a distress signal. It took days for people to figure out that something was wrong. The _Hartmann_ just had the luck of being the closest ship that could investigate. 

She almost jumps straight out of her suit when a shop’s automatic door slides open at her presence, raising her gun at cheerful holograms. Re-purposed pop-songs for last year’s fashion lines echo down the hollow streets. Valerie chuckles a little to herself, tension leaking as she lowers her pistol. The outer colonies were always behind on the trends.

“Mads?”

 _“Two-point-six kilometers ahead,”_ it reported, no irritation at being asked for the sixth time that hour.

MAD-E had reported when Valerie made it down to street level that there were signs another ship had crashed. Residual radiation from engine wake, unusual EM readings…the great big collapsed building Valerie could spot from the roof.

 _“Still no contacts on motion, heat, or biometric sensors,”_ MAD-E reports.

“Any change upstairs?”

_“My attempts to cycle through all military and civilian bands remain unsuccessful.”_

“Great.”

Valerie decided to keep her helmet on. MAD-E had said there were no _detectable_ bio-chemical agents or radiation. Yeah, real assuring- no telling what the hell happened down here. 

Normally, hiking the streets of a completely habitable colony would have a literal walk in the park. Fresh off a patch-job on her bones, head, half of her internal organs, it feels like barely holding together with nothing more some little robots and teeth-grinding stubbornness. Even with the suit picking up the slack every breath is effort, every step is a fresh ache on a _somewhere_ she didn’t even know could bruise.

Machine efficiency, of course. MAD-E didn’t care how uncomfortable Valerie is, only that she’s functioning.

Three blocks from the crash, street signs and wall screens flash warnings in a flurry of different languages and universal symbols for ‘get the hell away from here.’ Even without any people the city’s automation is still trying to respond to the emergency of a spaceship crash downtown. All citizens were advised to vacate the area with assurances that emergency personnel are ‘being dispatched.’

Too bad there’s no one left. Poor dumb computer’s probably trying to figure out why the slow response time. 

**_Danger! Peligro! Achtung!_ **

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you.”

She steps over the emergency barricades that have sprouted up from the road, ignores the persistent warnings ( ** _Zorgema!_** **危険!** ) and passive-aggressive holographic legal notices about failing to respond to municipal instructions during an emergency situation. A path of destruction carves right through the main thoroughfare, flattened groundcars practically embedded into pulverized insta-crete. Long furrows swipe across building faces like scratches from enormous claws. 

There’s less dust and smoke than Valerie expects- maybe cleaned up by municipal nanites that are supposed to keep the air clear. The crash site ends at an intersection, crashing into a building when it ran out of road. Valerie’s boots crunch glass shards and pulverized road as she heads towards it. 

She almost slips on something and loses her footing. Swearing, she lifts up her boot and sees a glowing greenish fluid- like she stepped in a broken glow-stick.

“The fuc-”

Oh.

Oh shit.

A surge of adrenaline rushes through her, spiced with dread and danger. Her pulse pounds in the narrow confines of her helmet. The canyon of the buildings press around her, menace at every angle. 

**_Le Danger!_** A sign says. Valerie agrees, but still approaches the end of the road, pistol raised. 

(It’s not enough, just a measly little peashooter. She needs to be strapped in, enclosed in her cockpit pod- grip tight on the control yokes)

“I should have stayed in the pod,” Valerie mutters.

_“I would agree, but I have been prohibited from speaking about the Forced Landing Protocols.”_

Bucketfuls of lambent green stains smears down the street, a path for her follow. The air is thicker at ground zero, clogged with dust, but its still enough for Valerie to make out the shape of the ship.

It’s enough to recognize it from the blurry, blown-up images on her displays. An elusive sensor profile. A black shape against a blue sky, blurring past when Valerie slammed the air brakes in an ill-advised maneuver. 

Valerie’d seen enough crashes to piece together what had happened. Hit the street skidding until a bad angle twisted it into a rolling tumble, stopping only when it crashed into the side of a building. Laid out on its side like a beached whale. 

No, smaller than a whale, but the comparison is too accurate. The thing looks more like a dead animal than a shipwreck- cracked iridescent black plating like a bug’s chitinous exoskeleton. The sickening bend of its fuselage reminds Valerie of cracked bone. More green fluid pools beneath it, fed by a steady drip.

"Jesus, you guys are ugly up close.” Valerie tells it. 

Dogfights were for fantasy sims and anachronistic biplanes. Most engagements were hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away, the enemy just green blips and sensors ghosts on screens. Never with her own flesh eyes. Never close enough to reach out and touch. 

Not that Valerie would actually walk up and poke the goddamn alien ship. That would be beyond stupid. She was a combat pilot- screened, trained, and tested. A veteran of a three-dozen combat missions- a goddamn _professional._

…she also has no idea what to do now. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard of anything like this happening, before. 

After weighing her options, Valerie decides to hunker down and observe the thing from a presumably safe vantage point behind some rubble. Watching it for for any signs of activity. 

No heat or energy fluctuations. Nothing on the EM band save the slowly dissipating particle trail from its engine wake. No activity coming from it at all except the slow and steady drip of green fluid on the broken insta-crete, pothole puddles vaguely glowing like a cartoonish caricature of ancient nuclear waste, because how _stupid_ had nuclear-age humans been before space colonization, right? 

An hour goes by. Two. Still nothing on comms either, that makes over twenty-one hours of radio silence. Valerie cleans her gun five or six times, suggests MAD-E try one trick or another that it has probably already tried before, but will do again anyway if only to humor her. She tries to weigh all the worse-case scenarios she knows are horribly likely with all the less-grim reasons why she couldn’t get a hold of anyone friendly. It doesn’t really help. 

Maybe they really were all dead, and she’s the last survivor. 

(Drip drip drip, the ship bleeds)

That still wouldn’t explain why everything was still being jammed, if the battle was over and done with. If the enemy won, why weren’t they sweeping for stragglers, or coming to collect their fallen buddy? Was that even something they cared about? Rescuing wounded, collecting their dead? 

Fucking aliens. They made no _sense_. No declarations, no demands. Just death and a dozen outer colonies scared shitless from the horror of humanity’s first real glimpse at an unknown that nature never intended them to meet. 

It’s not lost on her how much the wreck almost resembles an old DP-4 starfighter. As though they tried to make their own cheap knockoff by…growing it, or something. Used to be they took less conventional forms. The classic squiddies: amorphous, protean things that swam through space and captured ships with their tendrils. Or those sharp angled fast-movers that were like the skeletons of winged, alien predators. 

Others were immense and asteroid sized- impossible geometric shapes that fizzled out sensors and gave pilots vertigo if you tried to look at it for too long instead of shooting it. No two were ever the same, each one a species all their own. 

Now there were these new…ship-shaped ones; no one had answers, but everyone had a theory. Are they adapting to human tactics on purpose? Or is it all just single-celled mindlessness, evolutionary mechanisms reacting to new stimuli without any real intelligence or malice? For all they knew, the whole damn war is an gigantic misunderstanding between two races that were so different it’s impossible to understand each other. The death toll just a side-effect of bad communication.

Valerie doesn’t care for that last theory. 

A practiced flick of her eyes summons the clock in the corner of her helmet display. Hour three and still nothing from the wreck. Maybe it really is dead, and Valerie’s gotten herself skittish over what amounted to giant roadkill. The restlessness that’s been building since Valerie woke up, the ingrained military need to do _something_ accumulating in her like itch, all the maddening for being ignored.

…oh hell, she’s gonna go poke it, isn’t she? 

A growl escapes between her teeth- half determination, half berating herself. She checks her sidearm _again_ , as it would do shit against that thing’s hull if it did try to pounce. Still, it was a security blanket. A 5 millimeter security blanket. 

Valerie steps out of cover, gunsight trained on the bogey, still inert and dripping. Minds her footing to avoid the worse of the smears of green fluid that still show no sign of drying up. 

Closer. Closer. This is what it must have been like for some ancient ancestor, stalking up to a mammoth as it slept. Roar, I am woman, Fear my pointy stick, giant sky-monster.

Just an arm’s length away, now, and so far Valerie isn’t dead. Clearly, the gods have blessed this hunt. 

Up close she can see the damage ( _wounds,_ she almost wants to say, but doesn’t). Holes piercing the hull, fist-sized and larger that could only be hits from a fighter’s kinetic guns. Valerie raises up her hand and feels the edges of one of the bullet holes. 

(Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, threading the needle at mach six.)

Valerie feels a swell of satisfaction. She might have gotten shot down, but she sure as hell didn’t go down alone. “Bullseye, you alien fuck.”

Touching the thing’s hull, Valerie feels a vibration from deep inside, shuddering through her suit right down to her bones. Like a purr without a sound- the low reverberation notes of some great undersea thing, immense and mourning.

HolymotherofstarspangledChrist that thing is _still alive._

Valerie springs back like she’s been burned, gun raised on instinct. The hand is still tingling, her grip numb and insubstantial. The need to be airborne hits her like a phantom ache. Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, flick a switch so she could shred it apart with her cannons. 

She waits for the feeling to come back to her hand. “Mads? What was that?” 

_"Please specify.”_

“I just felt something from inside that thing. Like…like…a vibration, or something.” 

_“I did not detect any variances in the ship’s hull.”_

“So it’s just a coincidence it did that when I touched it?”

 _“There is no indication that the vessel has the capability to perceive individual lifeforms of your size, were it operational.”_ MAD-E’s reply is even and calm, but Valerie friggin’ hears the ‘lol look at the dumb human’ in its tone. _“I can only theorize it was psychosomatic, perhaps an adrenal response to being in close proximity to something you have instinctively registered as dangerous.”_

If it _was_ alive before- if a thing like this could even qualify- did that make what just happened its death throes? One last whimper before it was finally spent?

Well…its engines are still cold. It’s not going anywhere. She ain’t gonna scurry off like a dog running from a cleaner bot. Enough jumping at nothing. Time for morbid curiosity cleverly disguised as critical intelligence gathering. 

A few cautious, gingerly steps in the slick green mess of whateverthefuck, Valerie’s boots slide like she’s skating on grease. Easy Gray, don’t want to fall ass-first in the alien juice- be embarrassing on the footage playbacks.

The biggest…wound is at the neck of it, broke like two halves of a snapped twig still stubbornly hanging onto each other. Probably happened when it first crashed into the street nose-first. Now there’s a gaping hole- cracked hull and gooey insides like an egg. 

The…shell is scraped all to hell with the world’s worst case of road rash. It also looks more…melted at the mouth of the wound. Heat from entering the atmosphere…or maybe it was a sign of it slowly repairing the damage? Healing itself? This was way above her paygrade.

Still: know your enemy, like The Lance would say. He loved to throw out proverbs like that from those ancient books of his.

“Okay squiddy, let’s get to know each other a little.” Yeah, perfect. Let’s stick our head in the probably-but-maybe-not dead alien ship creature thing like a disposable side-character in a horror sim. Why the fuck not.

Oh hell, her jumpsuit is even red. Foley would have a goddamn field day. 

Needing both hands for this, Valerie holstered her gun gripped the sides of the hole, and hoisted herself up into the belly of the beast.

 **¡Cuidado!**

If this thing was…alive, its insides weren’t anything like dissection in science class. She’s in a cavity lined with a white fibrous membrane filled snaking tubes like veins and thousands of hair-thin strands branching off in every direction. It’s a twisting, coiling mess that reminds her of fungal closeups under a microscope. A marriage of biology and architecture. 

Jesus. This is officially the most disgusting thing she’s ever seen. The record has been set for all-time, never to be surpassed. Why is she even doing this again?

 _“This is very exciting!!”_ MAD-E chirps.

“You want to trade places? Be my guest.”

 _“If only!”_ it replies with disturbing sincerity. _“I will have to be satisfied with purely vicarious observation.”_

“Yeah, guess I’m just born lucky.”

She decides to follow the snaking cords- some as thick as her arm, others thin as straws from a fizzy-bottle. More than a few were torn and leaking new and exciting fluids, white and snotty. Follows their route further into the main body of the ship-thing. 

The cords and wires terminated at the base of the neck, right before the main body of the ship. Some kind of round…organ….sack? Big enough to wrap her arms around; a semi-solid translucent mass like an egg without a shell, layered in an iridescent film like oil on the surface of a bog. All of the sharp white hair-like things and the tubes were feeding into it. 

“The hell?” Her emergency pack has a med-kit, she takes it out and waves a bio-scanner at the egg-sack. It was designed for finding cracked bones or dangerous pathogens- not amateur xeno-biology. Whatever. Close enough for government work. 

“Mads?”

“The scanner is detecting electrical signals coming from the unknown mass, too complex to be random discharges.”

“Is it…a control unit, maybe? A brain?”

_“Unknown.”_

"Great,” Valerie mutters. 

It doesn’t quite…move, but beneath that sticky membrane is a hint of swirling viscosity. Like a squirming bacteria or a dollop from her dad’s antique “lava lamp” he insists is “cool.” As if lava is supposed to be cold.

So, like a moron who has already peaked at ‘huge idiot’, Valerie slowly stretches out her hand and lays it flat on the thing’s surface. It’s…surprisingly firm, soft but not a lot of give. It’s hard to get much sensation through her gloves. 

Then the shadow of another hand touches hers from the fucking inside of it. 

Valerie screams and pulls away so sharply she slips on green sludge underfoot and falls backwards out of the hole, landing hard on her back onto the goop-stained pavement below. Not as rough as her earlier landing, but it’s a rude reminder. She lays there for…a while, panting hard and swimming in the agony like a pulled muscle- but _everywhere_. 

She waits out it, mind still reeling because: “What. The. Fuck.”

_“Lieutenant Gray, are you alright?”_

“What the fuck was that?!” She never thought she’d be grateful to have MAD-E with her- _ever_ \- but having something to talk to that could at least talk back…Well, if anything she’s got a newfound appreciation for those stupid programmers or whoever the hell thought up having a computer-nanny momming into her ear.

“You saw that right? Tell me you saw that.”

_“Image recorders captured what appeared to be-”_

“There’s…there’s a fucking _person_ in there!” 

_“Based on the dimensions of the hand, that would be a likely conclusion.”_

“Marvel of technology, you are.” Getting up felt like high-gee in basic again. Pushing past the pain, Valerie climbs back up into the hole and crouches in front of the egg sack thing again. The thing with a fucking person inside it. 

Oh God. Is…is that what happened to the colonists here? To the crew of all the ships that vanished on the Periphery, the people in the orbital space stations and asteroid habs? There were never any remains- no bodies to recover. Just dark, gutted, and exposed to hard vacuum. Were they all ripped away, processed, shoved into the guts of a monster-ship to be used against their own families like _parts_?

_“Lieutenant Gray, your heart rate is elevated.”_

She has to. Needs to. Not just…stand there…gawking. Rummaging through the crash kit doesn’t yield a whole lot of options to work with: extra clips, repair tools, med kit, nutrient packs, a deployable lean-to.

Tycho Station was a floating cloud of debris ten trillion miles away and this whole colony’s gone Croatoan, like old spacers whisper about over engine-room moonshine. Valerie is going to save _one_ goddamn person _for once._

_“Lieutenant, I am recommending you have your suit administer a mild sedative.”_

The repair tools? No, those were designed for patching up ships, the plasma torch would probably hurt whoever was in there. Wait. A standard combat knife. Whose bright idea even was that? She flies fifty billion dollar star fighters; a knife is goddamn _neolithic._ Still, there’s a satisfying _shnk_ as she yanks it from its sheath.

By now, MAD-E’s probably figured out what she’s planning. _“Lieutenant. I don’t think-”_

“Shut up and just keep recording.” If she’s going to play amateur alien dissection, might as well have some documentation. Yeah, nice home movies. Put that on the net, she’ll be a star. 

The knife’s a carbon composite, manufactured by industrious little nanobots on the cheap, shaping the blade down to the nanometer. There’s barely any resistance at all when she stabs it into the oily membrane. She put too much force into it, expecting more resistance. She’s already wrist-deep in it, has to pull back her arm to try again. There’s some suction- like it’s almost try to pull her into it. Yanking her arm free, she goes at it with a lighter touch. More precise. At least pretend she knows what the hell she’s doing.

Distantly, Valerie knows she should be disgusted by this. Crawling into some alien thing and carving her way through it like a burrowing carrion eater. She’s goddamn Jane the Ripper, striking fear into all the little aliens. If the _Hartmann’s_ really gone and this thing’s buddies come to find a crazy goo-covered human with a knife, at least they’ll have a story to tell. 

She remembers herself, gets tangled in the fungal cords like a mess of wiring. Yanks the knife free and starts sawing instead- less hack, more scalpel. Don’t want to shank the person she’s trying to rescue by mistake. 

No commentary from MAD-E, obeying her order to letter. Just her own grunts and heavy breathing filling the helmet, the wet scraping noise of the blade meeting white tissue, the hiss of suction as the membrane splits open like a mouth. 

“I-I don’t know if you can hear me in there,” Valerie starts babbling, “But just…hang on, okay? I’m almost- I think I’m almost through. We’re getting you out of there, Okay?” Goddamn it, just a little bit more.

(There hadn’t even been a body, at her mother’s service. Just the artifice of an empty urn. No one to say goodbye to.)

She slices through something big. Green water the color of rotted limes hits Valerie full-on like a floodbreak, rushing past her and escaping the hole behind her to pool outside, as if it wasn’t a mess already.

And just like that, Valerie finds them. 

Their skin matches the soft issue of the ship’s innards: washed-out white like antiseptic bleach. At first she doesn’t understand what she’s found until she hears a soft gasp. They try to move- a pale, painfully thin arm lifts towards her, reaching. Valerie grabs it and they recoil, struggle, try to pull away, but they’re so weak it’s hardly any effort at all to hold on.

She tries to pull, almost loses her grip. Their skin is slick, covered in more of that oily, goopy crap. 

“It’s okay! I’m not trying to hurt you! I’m getting you out of this, okay?”

More of those cords and wires get in the way, like they’re tied up in- oh. _Oh God._ It takes a minute to fully process what it is she’s seeing: that shit is…fused to them. Like they’re plugged into the goddamn ship. Jesus, as if this isn’t already enough of a horror show. 

Whatever this crap is, it wasn’t made to be sturdy. Just thrashing around on their own is enough to snap and tear some of the tangle. It has to hurt too, with how pained mewling their gasps are getting as more of the mess breaks off. 

Fuck it. Time to rip off the galaxy’s nastiest band-aid. Valerie hacks away at the thickest of them, simultaneously fighting the nausea in her throat. The knife has to go back into its sheath messy- she needs both arms to get a good grip under their armpits and pulls back with all the force she can muster. They continue to thrash limply, probably too confused to understand what’s happening to them.

The legs are the last to go, too-white and slick. Valerie watches them slide out of what’s left of the ruined egg sack with a final sucking sound until all of them is free. Almost falls backwards on her ass, again. 

It’s a pain to climb out of the hull. Everything’s been washed in more gross alien goop and Valerie needs both arms to hold onto them steady. Leftover green stuff patters from the edges of the hole onto the ground like dripping rain.

“There we go, I got you. It’s okay. You’re safe now, alright? I got you, I promise.” Dammit, is she even doing this right? Talking to shell-shocked civilians- nevermind victims of _alien abductions-_ wasn’t exactly covered in flight school. 

She looks down to check her footing and- oh. She’s a girl, thin and frail looking in Valerie’s arms. Her skin is caked in an oily film of greenish spume, giving her a sickly pallor. Pieces of those cords and wires still dangle off her skin like hangnails. Her hair is an oily rope hanging heavy off her limp head, washed-out white as the rest of her. 

Boots back down on solid ground- the girl is spasming pathetically in her arms, barely any trouble. She’s so damn _light_ , Valerie doubts she even needs the nanites in her muscle fibers to carry her. 

The girl makes a choking sound and coughs, hacking up more of the gooey crap. 

“That’s it, let it out.” Valerie coaches her. “Try to breathe.”

It becomes obvious that’s she’s not, though. It doesn’t sound like choking anymore, more like a desperate wheezing of someone slowly suffocating. 

“What’s wrong?” Valerie instantly feels stupid for asking. The girl’s gasping like an asthma attack, squirming like she can somehow wrestle air into her lungs. 

Valerie puts her down on the least uncomfortable-looking patch of gooey road and fumbles with the med-kit’s scanner. “What’s wrong with her?”

Shut-up order officially rescinded, MAD-E syncs with the scanner and starts pouring over the data it’s pulling from her. Come on, come on, if it could put Valerie back together again it should be able to help her, too. 

_“The patient’s lungs are dangerously underdeveloped,”_ MAD-E is unaffected even as the girl imitates a suffocating fish. _“She needs a proper medical facilities with the ability to augment or stimulate their growth.”_

“We don’t have ‘proper facilities!’”

_“Working. The medical kit: second row, third vial from the left.”_

MAD-E walks her through preparing the dosage. This, Valerie can do. She keys in the proper delivery ratio into the injector gun, then presses the business end on the girl’s chest.

Valerie warns, “Sorry, this is gonna hurt.” and fires. 

From the looks of it, it does. She jerks and goes rigid, whimpering while the dose of nanites goes straight to her heart. Valerie hovers over her with the scanner while they start being distributed through her entire circulatory system, oxygenating her blood directly to compensate for her weak lungs. Within a minute, her breathing isn’t nearly as labored. 

_“That was only a temporary measure,”_ MAD-E says. _“She will need another injection in four hours, or her respiratory condition will deteriorate.”_

“Temporary is good. I can work with temporary. Set a reminder for me.”

_“Yes, Lieutenant.”_

Breathing easier, the girl hugs herself and shivers. Right, one problem solved, on to the next.

The survival kit has what she needs. Valerie places a fist-sized disc on the girl’s bare back, still pockmarked with angry green wounds from where the cords had been torn loose. They’re all over her; arms, her legs, the prominent ladder of her ribcage. Valerie pushes a button on the disk and watches the material flatten and spread itself over the girl’s skin until forms a simple white and black jumpsuit. Not nearly advanced as Valerie’s flight-suit, but enough to regulate her temperature, monitor her vitals, and is a touch preferable to nudity.

There’s also a heat-reflective blanket, which Valerie expands and drapes over her. Even asleep she instinctively wraps it around herself and curls smaller into herself. 

MAD-E reads the data from the jumpsuit. _“Her vitals are holding steady for now, Lieutenant. I think this is a good opportunity for you to get some rest as well.”_

The _last_ thing on Valerie’s to-do list is to sleep within 10 klicks of a goddamn alien monster ship, dead or no. But seeing the girl wrapped in her blanket flips a toggle in Valerie’s head, like the weight of everything that had happened since she’d woken up six hours ago finally settled into her, like gravity-sickness.

Guess her body isn’t counting being in stasis for thirty-six hours as proper sleep.

First step is a proper camp. The girl doesn’t stir when Valerie picks her up, blanket and all, and sets her a few more meters away from the crash, back near the rubble piles Valerie used as cover before. Not much of an improvement, but at least they’re not completely out in the open, anymore. She lays out a few thumbnail-sized security sensors around the perimeter and sets up a UV lamp in the middle for when it starts to get dark. There, now all they need are those marshmallow and graham cracker ration packs the brass won’t approve for inscrutable reasons. 

Sitting is a more complex maneuver than Valerie remembers. Maybe carving her way into a giant alien corpse-ship was a thing that you shouldn’t do while recovering from a near-fatal crash. Maybe not. The universe may never know. Her only blanket is currently being hogged by the new addition. The crash-kit also has the deployable lean-to, but the idea of getting that damn thing unfolded properly is a task she should have thought about while she was still on her feet. This nice pile of rubble she’s got her back up against will do just fine. 

With a final what-the-hell, Valerie also pops the seals of her helmet and gets her first breath of fresh, un-recycled air since she was planetside three months ago; is immediately filled with regret and something else that makes her nose crinkle.

Oh. Right. The dead gutted space monster-ship. What an amazing smell she’s discovered. 

Inaction looks to have been a signal for her entire body to start clamoring with a vengeance. Food not being a thing she’s had in technically two days, her stomach starts growling. Wonderful. The flavors are all universally bad, so it doesn’t much matter which ration pack she picks from the survival kit. Those hard-working little nanites floating around in her have to get their energy from _somewhere_.

She breaks the seal and starts sucking up flavored nutrient-gel through the nozzle. There was no escaping the slimy-goop bullshit today. Of course she _could_ have just had the suit inject her with an infusion instead, but MAD-E would probably raise a fit about it being reserved for massive blood loss and other medical crap.

Valerie keeps slurping on her goop-dinner, watching the strange girl she pulled out of an alien ship sleep. Even scrunched up fitfully her pale face is ethereal in the lamplight; the shallow rise and fall of her assisted-breathing a pattern Valerie finds reassuring. 

The packet falls half-deflated onto Valerie’s lap when she finally falls asleep.

* * *

Valerie doesn’t realize she’d dozed off until a noise wakes her. She’s reaching for holster before she’s even half-awake, faltering when it registers that its the tell-tale siren-call of the heat blanket, crinkling loudly like a crackling fire. 

The solar lamp had turned itself on when the sun set, casting soft light over their little makeshift campground. At the edge is the shape of the wreck, a looming dead presence like the bones of some primeval beast. Valerie shivers from a half-dissolved dream: a hunting shadow slithering over a field of stars, the red glow of her emergency cockpit lights, the fear of being buried alive in a universe’s worth of nothing. 

She breathes deep and almost welcomes the bracing rot. At least it wakes her up.

The girl is already awake herself, sitting up and wrapped in her blanket like an extra-large ration pack. Most of that gunk from the ship’s innards looks like it’s finally dried off into a tacky, flaked mess. Her snowy hair is stained and matted in crusty clumps. 

She doesn’t acknowledge that Valerie had woken up at all. Too busy examining her own hands in the lantern-light with a peculiar fascination.

“How are you feeling?”

The girl looks up at the sound of Valerie’s voice and-

It’s like being back up in the sky again, seeing streak of green plasma blur past her ship in the corner of her eye. Never saw the one that hit her engines and sent her in an uncontrolled spin- _tore her out of the sky._

Her eyes are bright, luminous green. As piercing as those shots, impossible and strangely beautiful.

 _“Lieutenant.”_ MAD-E says. 

A wire of tension unspools in her. Valerie is surprised to find her hand tight around the grip of her gun. 

Valerie finally grasps the edges of her mistake, slippery for all the alien goopsnot. That isn’t the glowy-eyed, thousand yard stare of young civilian still reeling from the trauma of a violent abduction. 

“What is hell is this, Mads,” it’s a demand, not a question. 

_“Underdeveloped lungs, muscle atrophy, deficiencies of vitamins D and K, calciu-”_

“I’m talking about her fucking _eyes_.” She hisses, because they’re still goddamn staring at her. 

_“Based off the limited capabilities of the medical scanner, I cannot definitively-”_

“MAD-E.”

_“There were anomalous results from her genetic scan. I noted several unknown variations and genesets that do match any known human genome.”_

Valerie could almost swear she felt her insides go still- breath, blood, and all. Just a few steps away the girl’s otherwordly eyes blinked, uncomprehending. 

_“Furthermore,”_ MAD-E goes on blithely, as if she hadn’t already dropped a fucking bombshell. _“Despite the subject’s decreased bone density, her skeleton shows no detectable traces of breaks, stress fractures, or microfissures that would be present for a human in her age range.”_

That…shouldn’t be possible. Even with nanites or collagen regeneration, there was always going to be scarring. Signs of damage and healing. Of…of… _living_.

Unless.

“How old is she, Mads?” Valerie asks quietly, eyes never leaving the girl. 

She looks like she could be any average college co-ed. Skinny like someone raised in low-gravity, but not stretched out. Even the hair is pretty tame compared to the crazy augs some people did, but those _eyes_ -

It’s not just the glowing. It’s the wide-eyed, naked bafflement of everything she’s looking at. Clueless as a kitten. 

_“Her telomeres have been altered, making the margin of error for any estimate-”_

They-

They fucking _grew_ her. 

Had she ever been outside of that ship, before now? Even sitting up she was swaying unsteadily from the strain of her own weight. Forget walking, _standing_ is probably beyond her at this point. 

In the sky, it’d been a different story. Like trying to outswim a shark. A creature made for the Black. Picking off Valerie’s wingmates one.

By.

One.

Something in Valerie’s body language makes the…girl (the pilot, the heart of that monster) tilt her head, quizzically. Almost birdlike. 

The gun’s out of its holster, sitting in Valerie’s lap next to the unfinished ration pack. She never thought about its weight since the first time she had to pick up a gun in basic. The density. The complexity of so many moving parts just to fling a few grams of bullet faster than a pair of glowing alien eyes could see coming. 

“Do you remember what it was like when you were in that thing?” Valerie gestures at the dark husk overlooking them with the gun. The alien-eyes remain fixed on her, captured by the sound of her words but deaf to the meaning. “Did you realize what it meant, when you shot those other ships down?”

She’d burned her engines past red and still couldn’t reach them before their radios let out an garbled scream and a burst of static that meant Orion and Hotshot hadn’t had time to eject. No waiting it out safe and cozy in stasis. Only the hard vacuum and the wreckage of their birds for company.

The girl doesn’t answer. Keeps watching Valerie with those bright, ghost-light eyes as though Valerie was the most perplexing puzzle. Keeps sitting there, wrapped in the foiling cape of her blanket. Like she’s waiting for Valerie to keep going. 

Benign only in ignorance, she tells herself. If she understood the noise Valerie was making with her mouth, if Valerie told her that she’d been the one to bring her down, would that blank, soft face contort with a twisted snarl and try to lunge at her, atrophied muscles be damned? 

No. She’s just grasping for any excuse to finish off the last living piece of that Thing that killed her wingmates. Leave her body in a puddle of goo next to her corpse-ship like _they_ were floating cold in their own wreckage.

"This would be a lot easier if we were both back up there, instead of down here,” Valerie tells her. 

A chime from her helmet on the ground beside her. _“Lieutenant.”_

Valerie stands up sharply, pistol still in her grip. Crosses the distance between them and stands over her.

The girl blinks up at Valerie. Her breath rasps.

Valerie crouches down in front of her and prepares a new dose. The weight of the injector in her other hand makes her feel titled. Off balance. 

(Grip on the yokes, thumbs on the toggles, flick a switch and )

To her credit, the girl doesn’t even flinch. She puts her hand up to the injection site on her neck, grasping at her own steadying pulse. Valerie can almost hear the connections are being made. Basic animal cause and effect. 

Valerie holsters her sidearm and lifts injector a hair higher. “That should keep you for a bit. You’ll need another injection in a few hours.”

The girl opens her mouth. “Jeck-shun” Her tongue stumbles on the syllables. 

Valerie freezes in the middle of packing the kit back up. “…yeah. Jeck-shun. Close enough.”

“Klo Seenuff.”

Goddamn it that one actually makes Valerie burst out a surprised laugh. The girl tilts her head again at the unfamiliar sound.

Valerie stands up, considers the speculative look on the girl’s face. She turns around and walks back to her side of the camp and eases herself back down. 

“You’re lucky I have a thing about strays.”

“Luh-key.”

“You have no idea.” 

“Eye-Deeya.”

“You still recording this, Mads? Riveting stuff going on here.”

 _“Yes, Lieutenant,”_ it pipes up from Valerie’s helmet.

She frowns with concentration. Valerie’s tempted to almost call it adorable. “Loot..ten. Ant?”

“Congratulations, you officially say it better than Dash.”

“Dha-sha.”

Valerie sighs. “What am I going to do with you?”

Surprisingly, she doesn’t answer. Maybe it’s the tired resignation in Valerie’s voice.

Whatever. Ultimately, the question was moot. A decision will be made all on its own, with or without Valerie’s input. All there is to do is sit around and wait to see who drops out of the sky first. 

The sky. Valerie cranes her head up. The stars grow thicker here, on the edge of settled space. Diamond dust overflowing on a black canvas. She’d almost forgotten why she enlisted all those years back, before the _Amitié_ Mission vanished, before Elmerton Station and her mother’s empty urn. 

Danny was right. It really is _everything_ , up there. 

A movement at the edge of her vision. The girl was looking up too, transfixed at the starry dome over their heads.

“Like the stars too, huh?”

“Stars.” She mumbles, barely blinking. 

The crash must have knocked out the power on this block- the UV lamp is a lonely circle of light surrounded by indistinguishable dark. Their own little Island on a seas of stars.

It’s like something out of a bad sim: a pair of unlikely castaways alone on a conveniently habitable planet. Then again, in all likelihood, the two of them probably _are_ the only people left on the entire planet- alien weirdness notwithstanding. 

Valerie points at a thin white streak. “Look, a shooting star.”

“Shoot.”

“No, a shooting sta-” A blast of thunder shudders down from above, a long echo grumbling through the empty city spires. The girl squeaks with surprise, but Valerie shoots to her feet. There is not a single stormy cloud up there, and the shooting star is getting larger. 

“Something’s just hit atmo…” Valerie dives for her helmet and put it back over her head. “MAD-E!”

 _“Three distinct shockwave events.”_ MAD-E reports. 

She clenches a fist. “Profile?”

It takes four long, agonizing seconds for MAD-E to deliver its verdict. _“One Riptide class shuttle and a fighter escort. They have already breached the stratosphere and are decelerating. Most likely vector is towards_ Nova Ventura. _”_

“Yes! Hell yes!” The weight of the past two days slides off her shoulders from the tide of sheer elation. “Hail them.”

“Working…I am unable to raise them on emergency channels. There is still interference from the jamming signal.”

Shit. That means there were still unfriendlies around. Without comms or sensors any of search-and-rescue op would be risky at best, hugely dangerous at worse. Someone up there must really like her.

The pilot trades off between glancing worriedly at the sky and back to Valerie rummaging through the crash-kit. “Loot-ehn-ant?”

“We are out of here, bright-eyes,” Valerie points skyward. “Take a look up there, that’s our ride.”

The shooting star from before has grown in size, flaring with the heat-bleedoff from a steep entry. 

“Shoot.” the girl says again. 

For once, Valerie appreciates the neurotic preparation of the nerds who designed the crash kit. Flares were ridiculously low-tech, but without a way to signal the ships, the only other option Valerie has is sticking out her thumb. 

They ignite with an angry hiss, throwing dark green light that make the shadows dance. Lighting every single one, Valerie tosses them down a few meters down the road to mark a good LZ. 

The escort fighters do their flyover first, the rumble of their own engines lags behind after they pass. Valerie watches them circle in a holding pattern with a tinge of envy. Down the road, the lights of the shuttle come toward them, following the same route the alien ship made on its way down, if less crashy. 

Spotlights orbit around the crash sight, settling over them and the ship. The visor of Valerie’s helmet compensates automatically, but the the girl flinches and hides her head under the flaring surface of her blanket. 

Engine backwash blows gales of dust as the shuttle’s thrusters pivot, leveling it out and slowly easing it down on the broken road. 

_“Strange,”_ MAD-E remarks. _“I am not receiving any IFF transponder signals from the shuttle, even at this range.”_

“Can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want to broadcast their position,” Valerie replies, more focused on the decent of the shuttle’s gangplank. 

The girl is outright trying to hide under the heat blanket at this point, frightened by the noise the strange ship. Valerie goes to her and lifts up a corner of the blanket. Two panicked, neon green eyes peer at her.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to hide. You’re with me, I’ll take care of you. Promise.”

“…pra-miss?”

“Yeah. Promise.” Valerie holds out her hand. The pilot looks at it, incredulous. Slowly, her pale, thin fingers lightly touch the glove of Valerie’s suit. Valerie grasps it as firmly as she dares before letting go and standing up. Should probably warn the SAR team about this so they don’t spook the-

A swarm of boots drum down the gangplank. Not Search and Rescue medics, but two full squads of troopers geared head to toe in bone-white armor sweep the landing zone. Their rifles are primed and ready- as though they were expecting an ambush from every corner. 

Valerie raises a hand. “Evening, fellas. Glad you could finally join us. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but-”

None of them even look her way, their full-faced helmets betraying nothing. Sometimes she’ll see them glance at one another, a nod here or a minute motion there that suggests they were talking to each other in a way Valerie couldn’t hear. Probably all sharing scrambled, short-range comm. 

One squad breaks away and starts marching her way. “Finally. Hey guys, can anyone tell me what’s going on upstairs? I haven’t been able to get through to-”

They march past her like she was invisible, guns raised and cautiously approaching the crashed alien ship. 

“Don’t worry about that thing. If it wasn’t dead on-impact, it definitely crashed after I-” She trails off, because a four-man team just formed a semi-circle in front of them and have all trained their guns on her. No, not just her.

“Loo-Ten-ant?” The girl huddles in her blanket anxiously. 

Valerie steps in front of them, blocking most of their shots. “Whoa, whoa hey now, safety those things. The hell are you-”

“Stand down, Lieutenant Gray.”

Two of the soldiers part without breaking their sight lines. A pair of men in the plain, unassuming white uniform of the Observer’s Office step through the gap. Their hair is shaved even shorter than regulation length to the point of baldness and their eyes are hidden under black specs. 

“Finally, some human contact.” Valerie snaps. “Can someone explain to me what the hell is going on?”

The first Man in White motions at the girl hiding behind Valerie’s legs with a gloved hand. “Please step away, Lieutenant.”

“Loo-ten-ent?” She asks quietly. 

“Listen-” Valerie pulls off her helmet- one of the solider tenses and raises his rifle a little higher before. “I’ve been down in this creepy-ass colony for the past forty-six hours. The whole city is empty, I haven’t been able to raise anyone on comms, I’ve got no idea what’s going on up there-”

“The situation is under control,” The Second Man says coolly. 

“What does that even mean? What happened to the _Hartmann_?” 

“Relax, Lieutenant. The battle’s over. The _Hartmann_ is intact and station-keeping in high obit about the planet’s southern pole.”

Valerie exhales. “Thank God- wait. That doesn’t make any sense. How are we still being jammed if the enemy is-” 

It’s like crashing all over again. First the hit, losing control as the world spins.

“It’s been you,” she breathes. “The squids haven’t been jamming comms. It’s been you the whole time.”

The First Man in White starts reciting: “Under Special Directive granted to the Observer’s Office by Director Masters and the Ecumene Council, this area is under quarantine.”

The second man continued. “Lieutenant Gray, you are hereby ordered to report for a full debrief. All footage starting from when you came out of emergency stasis will be confiscated and classified Above Top Secret, including the full contents of your Virtual Intelligence Asset.”

MAD-E starts to say, _“I would be happy to assist however I can. However, I-”_

“Lexic: White Zero-Six-Three Over Specter-Kay.”

 _“Confirmed,”_ MAD-E responds obediently, then, apologetically to Valerie: _“Their credentials are valid, Lieutenant. The orders are legal.”_

Years of military discipline keeps her mouth fixed in a firm line. “…what about her?”

“That,” The Man in White nods first to the wreck, then to the girl. “And _that_ are to be taken into custody.” 

“Step _aside_ , Lieutenant.” The cold edge in the second’s one voice is as subtle as a knife to the throat. 

A gloved hand motions one of the troopers to stow away their weapon. Valerie watches them move towards the girl and is very aware that the other three still have theirs leveled at her. She’s standing in political black hole, where scruples get devoured and crushed beyond recognition. It wouldn’t be hard to sell that one lone, relatively skilled but ultimately insignificant fighter pilot had been shot down and died in the crash. Too much damage to the pod on impact, full stasis and life support failure. Her father would get a flag, a posthumous medal, and an empty urn to put beside his wife’s.

Valerie does nothing as the trooper grabs the girl. Hears the frantic crinkle of the heat blanket, the weak grunts and a shout. 

“Loo-ten-ent? _Lootenent_!” 

Valerie can’t even tell her she’s sorry. Not now, not with those hidden eyes watching.

The trooper walks past. Valerie feels a desperate tug on the sleeve of her flight suit and she has to keep her eyes locked on the Man in White. It’s the only way to keep her expression from betraying her. 

Another four man fireteam escorts the trooper carrying the thrashing girl to the shuttle, where a pair of medics wait at the gangplank and administer a sedative that reduces her to a ragdoll in seconds. 

Jeck-shun, Valerie thinks. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“That’s outside both of our paygrades.” The other Man in White snorts. His partner shoots him a look- probably the first damn show of emotion she’s seen from either of them since they landed.

Valerie looks past them and watches the girl be carried up the gangplank and vanish into the shuttle. Valerie can’t hear what any of them are saying, but their body language speaks volumes. None of them seemed confused or alarmed at the sight of ghostly pale, glowy-eyed girl being dragged from the site of a crashed alien ship. Certainly not as bad as Valerie had taken it, when she found out. 

Her heart jumps at another sonic boom. More ships entering the atmosphere, probably bringing in the personnel and equipment they’ll need to start preparing the main body of the wreck for transport. Half the troopers have already moved from securing the scene to setting up tripods for high-powered lights and portable generators. It all plays out with the clockwork smoothness of a routine well-practiced.

Crossing her arms, Valerie looks right into the image of herself in the lens of the Man in White.

"She’s not the first you found, is she?”

**Author's Note:**

> Despite not getting all that much attention when I first released it, I'm altogether pretty satisfied how this turned out, which I honestly count as a victory. Always loved space battles and science fiction, so it feels like this was more for me, than anything. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
